20 Great Ideas To Steal In 2013

IT innovators turn great ideas into action. Use these winning InformationWeek 500 projects to spark your creativity and advance your plans.

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The Healthways Well-Being Improvement Solution is designed to advance care for the chronically ill, reduce health-related risks and keep healthy people healthy.

A key facet is a Web-based survey that measures a person's overall financial, social and physical status. Data from this survey informs the Well-Being product's predictive models and identifies ways to improve employee performance and reduce healthcare costs. Because the survey is usually administered during a company's annual health benefits enrollment period, load times can reach 100 times the average intensity for short durations.

Healthways has deployed hundreds of servers in its data center. However, to cut costs and adjust scale as needed, it needed a more flexible cloud-based alternative that also met rigid healthcare security regulations. Healthways worked with Microsoft to use Windows Azure as the platform for a public cloud/on-premises hybrid setup. In short, Healthways moved some of the survey code into a Windows Azure cloud, and now 21% of well-being assessments are completed using Azure, with the ability to better scale capacity as needed. By moving Web survey code and administration to Azure cloud technology, the average cost of delivering the survey dropped by 67% per survey.

Impressed overall with how these companies didn't let corporate killers like inertia and bureaucracy prevent them turning ideas into action. I'm partial to the companies that went mobile in a big way by developing mobile apps (Dallas Cowboys, Salvation Army, Mitsubishi) or replacing paper products and old hardware with smartphones and tablets (Procter & Gamble, Dish).

BIDMC has consistently been a leader in health IT, and OpenNotes is no exception. OpenNotes keeps patients engaged in their healthcare and educated about their health, possibly resulting in better outcomes. CIO John Halamka is a true innovator there.

"The creation of eAdvisor had a direct impact on the freshman retention rate. Retention rates from 2008-2012 increased by 1.7% year over year. However, retention rates in the year after eAdvisor's launch increased by 6.8%."

That is seriously impressive. I'd be interested in knowing what other factors may be involved, but any university that improves retention that much that quickly deserves praise.

UPS will probably write the book on telematics analysis. But this company also gets the people part of the customer relationship right. I know a very senior IT person who was won over by UPS on a business level because she was impressed by them as a consumer: Her neighborhood driver leaves a dog biscuit on top of all packages left at her door. Talk about thinking like a customer. I am betting there is not a biscuit metric but I bet the biscuits go a long way.